


Be Kind to Yourself

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [105]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Cisgender, Comfort, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Kindness, Menstruation, Mood Swings, Protective Loki (Marvel), Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:33:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25157809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: When the newness of the world and the familiarity of your period symptoms crash in and overwhelm you, Loki is there.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [105]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 12
Kudos: 196





	Be Kind to Yourself

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how many of my readers identify as anything other than cis females, so I don't know how inclusive this fic is going to be. It's another period story, and this time the reader specifically refers to her symptoms as "girl stuff". BUT NOT EVERYONE WHO GETS A PERIOD IS A GIRL, AND NOT ALL GIRLS GET PERIODS. I know this, but this particular fic is about a girl who does get a period. I think I kind of want to make some kind of fully-anonymous survey so I can have a better idea of the demographics of my readers. I'm toying with the idea. I love you, no matter who you are. Please be kind to yourself.

When things were normal, your period was no big deal. There was a big world out there, full of things that needed to get done and people that needed to be talked to and just a whole endless stream of day-to-day stuff that was always enough to distract you out there. Maybe you were a little more irritable on the worst days, and sometimes you wore soft flowy skirts to work instead of your tailored work pants, but you could take a painkiller and throw yourself into your work so you didn’t have to think about it.

But things were _not_ normal. Maybe they’d never be normal again. You were still working from home and, while most days you could appreciate something like that, this week...it was difficult. 

It didn’t really help that work had been slow for ages now. There wasn’t much that really needed to get done on a day-to-day basis. It had gotten to the point where you’d started to worry about layoffs, but your boss had assured you over and over again that that wasn’t going to happen. There was a lot to be said for being employed by Tony Stark in the middle of a pandemic. You did what you could, and then you did whatever you could convince a coworker to let you take off their plate, and then you...hung out at home. 

Every single day, you thanked your lucky stars that Loki was here with you. Despite the newness of this whole relationship, a few weeks into the citywide lockdown, he’d just appeared at your door one afternoon and told you that he didn’t want to go another day without being able to touch you. So he stayed here. It was strange for you, having someone like him puttering around in your apartment, but he didn’t seem overly bothered by the tininess of it, or the shabbiness, or the fact that he had to share the limited space with you all the time. If you were a different kind of person, you might even have thought that maybe he _liked_ it. Sure, he had to do a lot of the human, domestic kind of chores that surely servants would have done for him in his childhood home, or that staff would have done for him in the Tower, but sometimes you caught him smiling or humming as he did those things. It was _weird_. And nice.

Right now, you were curled up on the couch. For a while, you’d been trying to get something— _anything_ —done for work, but by now your hands had mostly stilled on the keyboard. A dull ache was beginning to set up shop in your back and belly. Logically, you knew that you needed to get up and take a painkiller now before things got worse. But that seemed daunting. Now that you were at home all the time, with very few other things to keep your attention, it was hard to ignore all the bullshit that happened inside your body around this time of month. So far, things promised to be awful.

Yesterday you’d been unforgivably snippy with Loki. He wasn’t even doing anything out of the ordinary, but you’d growled and snapped at him all morning and afternoon before shame finally shut you up in the evening. He’d graciously accepted your apology over dinner, and then held you so sweetly in bed, playing with your hair until he’d lulled you to sleep. This morning, when your head was slightly clearer, you kind of hated yourself for losing control like that—like a kid on her first period instead of a grown woman who’d been having them for years—but he firmly refused to allow you to apologize to him again. 

He made himself scarce when you opened your computer to start working, and you had to remind yourself that he did it only so he wouldn’t distract you from what you were working on, instead of because he couldn’t stand you anymore. Your period really had a way of teaming up up with your run-of-the-mill anxiety and self-esteem issues and knocking you right out. Ugh.

A quick, sharp pain through your abdomen made you groan and snap your computer closed. The achiness you could deal with. The shooting pains, those were nasty. You dragged yourself to your feet and trudged down the hall into the bathroom. You opened your medicine cabinet to retrieve the bottle of painkillers, and when you shut it again, Loki was there in the reflection, standing right behind you like a jump scare in a horror movie. True to form, you startled, dropping the bottle into the sink, and then swore under your breath.

“Are you in pain?” This sweet man, this absolute angel, seemed genuinely concerned. He met your eyes in the mirror and placed a comforting hand on your shoulder. You shrugged and opened the bottle.

“It’s just...girl stuff. I’ll be fine.” You put the pill in your mouth and then turned on the faucet to drink several mouthfuls of water from your cupped palms. It was a little uncomfortable, doing something so _human_ when you knew that Loki was watching, but it had to be done. You shut off the water and dried your hands on a towel. When you were finished, and when you’d put the bottle back in the cabinet, he pulled gently on your arm to turn you around to face him.

You didn’t _really_ want to have to look him in the eyes, but you made yourself do it anyway. His brows were heavy, his eyes almost woeful as he studied you. He cupped your face so gently in his palms and brushed his thumbs along your cheekbones. “What can I do?” You drew in a breath so that you could laugh it off and tell him not to worry about it, but he tightened his grip on your face ever-so-slightly and narrowed his eyes at you. “And if you tell me that there’s nothing, I’ll just have to steal your computer and do research on my own.”

You couldn’t really stop the laugh that burst out of you, quick and short and dry, and you covered his hands with your own. “ _Really_. There’s nothing. Just, uh...maybe try really hard not to fall out of love with me this week?” 

It was Loki’s turn to laugh, but when he saw that you weren’t so much as smiling, his brow furrowed again. “There’s not a chance of that.” And he sounded so sure of himself, like he hadn’t seen you at some of your absolute worst yesterday. Tears stung your eyes, sudden and unexpected, but when you groaned and tried to look away, he only stepped closer so he could take you into his arms. 

He spent the rest of the afternoon absolutely _doting_ on you. You did your best to remain as even-keeled as you could, even as he sat with you on the sofa and chatted and rubbed your back and stroked your hair. Your brain kept rearing up and trying to convince you that you didn’t deserve this, and that Loki deserved someone who couldn’t be absolutely destroyed like this by a normal human process. Your eyes pricked with tears more often that you would ever have admitted, but Loki didn’t breathe a word about it, even when you hid your face in his chest. 

Not for the first time, hot rage stabbed through you as you thought about all the people Out There who still thought of him as a monster. When you walked together, people still cringed away from him and sometimes even crossed the streets to avoid him even though he was holding your hand and smiling at you. The monster those morons feared, he was sitting here in your living room and working your hair into tiny braids and telling you stories about Asgard. There _was_ no monster.

But you kept your anger to yourself. Sometimes when you couldn’t hold back and it erupted out of you, he seemed almost touched by your rage, but, more often, he shrugged it off with a quiet nonchalance. Instead, you kept your arms around him, hugging him in your best approximation of a sideways, half-lying-down bear hug and whispering to him over and over again that you loved him. Finally he laughed quietly and kissed your forehead. “If I can expect _this_ from you every month, perhaps I shall look forward to it.”

You couldn’t laugh with him, though. “Yeah, sure. You’ve just got to survive the heinous bitch first, and then you can have the pathetic weepy fool as much as you want.”

He was quiet for a minute, but his arms remained firmly around you. At last he squeezed you, something between a hug and a shake, and said your name in a low voice. “If I heard anyone else speaking about you that way, I’d have their head.” 

You weren’t sure how to respond to that. He had a point. He was exceedingly good about keeping his temper under control with you, but that patience did not usually extend to other people. But you were just telling the truth about yourself, weren’t you? After all, you lived with yourself, inside your own head, all of the time. But you didn’t really want to fight with him about that right now. So you drew in a long, slow breath, and let it out. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t respond for a long time, but he did press another soft kiss to your forehead, which served as an assurance that he wasn’t still angry with you. Then he shifted a bit, and held you a little more closely. “Your whole world is in flux right now. You’ve never gone through something like this before. Please be gentle with yourself. _I_ need you to be gentle with yourself. I love you madly, darling. Nothing can change that.”

God. You closed your eyes and asked yourself, not for the first or the last time, what the hell you could ever have done to deserve someone like him. You held him so tightly that your arms began to tremble, but even then, you did not let him go.

In a little while, the growling of your stomach would interrupt the peaceful stillness between you and drive you to your feet so you could retrieve your stack of take-out menus. But for right now, you did not move. Loki was holding you. The love in his touch made your aches and pains fade into the background until they were completely overshadowed by his adoration. You prayed. To every god you’d ever heard of or thought of, you sent desperate prayers of gratitude for the fact that Loki was here. You thanked the universe. You thanked fate. And then you shifted so that you could nuzzle against the tender skin of his throat, and you thanked Loki himself, both in your mind and with your mouth.

He laughed quietly, more of a rumble in his chest than a true laugh, and worked his hand under the hem of your shirt so he could rest it against your lower back. He held you like he’d never let you go.


End file.
